"Your name is Sora... Because you're just like the sky... Beautiful, dignified, and full of life."

— Sora's parents

"Father... Mother... The sky... Isn't beautiful at all... I want to clean up this sky!"

— Sora, sora's teaser trailer from Accleration of SUGURI

sora is a follow-up to the fan-acclaimed SUGURI, a horizontally-scrolling doujinShoot 'em Up by Orange_Juice and it was released during Comiket 78 for Windows PC.

Just like its predecessor, it stars an eponymous protagonist who must fight her way through waves of Mecha-Mooks with a boss waiting at end of each stage while trying to save the world. sora's storyline takes place on a once peaceful world being ravaged by an ongoing war. It was a war that brought chaos, death, destruction, and the end of any moral values that will ultimately bring an end to all life on Earth. This is where Sora is unwillingly sent into battle to settle the score, when all she wants is to bring back the Earth to it's former glory.

Like Suguri before her, Sora can amass a large arsenal of weapons at her disposal, ranging from beam rifles, bazookas, beam swords, and even a pile bunker thrown in for good measure. The game maintains its trademark dashing and lock-on shooting gameplay from its predecessor, but unlike our previous silver-haired heroine, Sora's able use to three weapons instead of two (generally an energy weapon, a ballistics weapon, and a close-range weapon). The game also improved on its combo-based scoring system, adding more emphasis on funneling through enemy fire to restore some lost life energy and building up energy for your Hyper Attacks.

sora unfortunately received a terribly-made English localization by an Internet troll under the company name of ΩTH (who turned out be FalcomGameFan) on June 1st, 2012. It involves use of such terms as "reploids" when the characters are actually referred to as "altered humans", a few name changes that threw its Theme Naming off, copy-protection to botch the game from being playable after purchase, Idiot Programming, and above all else, a terrible translation of the game. Not only that, but they even started copyright flagging videos of the game on YouTube. Fans of the previous SUGURI series localized by Rockin' Android aren't happy about this, thus leading to an online petition being formed to get the game professionally localized by someone else. If you wish to save this game from its terrible localization, please do so here!

Like SUGURI before it, sora was followed up with a Shoot 'em Up-Fighting Game hybrid with Acceleration of SUGURI 2 released a year later during Comiket 80 in 2011. The game features both the heroines and boss characters of their respective game as playable characters, a Story Mode* (which wasn't added until v1.3), an Arcade Mode, a local and online Versus Mode. During it's initial release however, lacked certain key features originally planned for the game and suffered from character balance issues. Thankfully, the Orange_Juice took action and fixed many of the game's issues through patches.

sora's official Japanese website can be viewed here and Acceleration of SUGURI 2's website can be viewed here.

Apocalypse How: The war between humans and altered humans brought destruction to Earth as it made very the air to support any lifeforms toxic and ultimately uninhabitable.

Art Evolution: A huge improvement from the artist in terms of the art-style and overall visual quality in sora compared to SUGURI. The same goes for Acceleration of SUGURI 2 compared to its predecessor.

Golden Ending: During the EX Stage, Sora notices the sky is still black and toxic while descending to Earth, realizing her efforts of trying to save the Earth are for naught. She then finds Hime and Suguri on Earth and blames them for the fighting that ruined the world and then proceeds to attack them. Once the fighting was over, Suguri reveals to Sora that in the end, she saved the world and the sky has returned the beautiful clear blue color she once remembered from her childhood.

Dub Name Change: In ΩTH's English localization of sora, the names changes as follows: Tsih's name was changed to Telos, Sham was changed to Siri, and Nath was changed to Nadius.

Gratuitous English: In sora, it features the songs "Le Train", "Grand blue", and sora's version of "Rendezvous"* Hime's boss theme from the first game, all of which incorporates English vocals instead of Japanese, although some of songs have mistranslated lyrics.

Acceleration of SUGURI 2 has "Swordfish" and "Remember me", both of which are also sung in English. The latter does suffer from mistranslated lyrics; the former on the other hand, not as much.

Limit Break: Hyper Attacks also returns in sora and Acceration of SUGURI 2, but players can now chose either Standard* (which lets the player evoke their Hyper Attack immediately corresponding to the weapon button held when launching the attack like the original SUGURI) and Advanced* (which will enact a shield to protect the player from harm for a brief amount of time, during which can trigger the Hyper Attack if any of the weapon buttons are pressed while the shield is up) modes to invoke the Hyper Attacks.

Macross Missile Massacre: Like Suguri, via the Launcher weapon. Stage 1 also opens with this, although this trope is invoked in many places of the game.

Meaningful Name: Sora's parents named her after the Japanese word for "sky", referring to how beautiful they are, although it doesn't seem like the sky is beautiful at all in the game at first; after the battle with Hime and Suguri in the EX Stage, the black and toxic skies returns to its beautiful, clear blue color again, thus Sora fulfilled her dream of returning the Earth to the way it was.

In original Japanese release of the game most of the bosses are named after stars. Then we have Starbreaker...

Mook Maker: Sham can summon robots as her reinforcement. Because of this, she also doubles as Flunky Boss.

No Continue Run: Required to unlock the secret characters and their respective stages in Acceleration of SUGURI 2.

Obvious Beta: The initial version of Acceleration of SUGURI 2, it had character balance issues and lacked some features originally intended upon release like the Story Mode. Thankfully these problem were remedied by v1.3.

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